Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange was born in Trenton, New Jersey, United States on October 18th, 1948 and is the Poet. At the age of 70, Ntozake Shange biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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In 1975, Shange moved back to New York City, after earning her master's degree in American Studies in 1973 from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. She is acknowledged as having been a founding poet of the Nuyorican Poets Café. In that year her first and most well-known play was produced — for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. First produced Off-Broadway, the play soon moved on to Broadway at the Booth Theater and won several awards, including the Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and the AUDELCO Award. This play, her most famous work, was a 20-part choreopoem — a term Shange coined to describe her groundbreaking dramatic form, combining of poetry, dance, music, and song — that chronicled the lives of women of color in the United States. The poem was eventually made into the stage play, was then published in book form in 1977. In 2010, the choreopoem was adapted into a film (For Colored Girls, directed by Tyler Perry). Shange subsequently wrote other successful plays, including Spell No. 7, a 1979 choreopoem that explores the Black experience, and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (1980), which won an Obie Award.
In 1978, Shange became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media. Shange taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston from 1984 to 1986. While there she wrote the ekphrastic poetry collection Ridin the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings and served as thesis advisor for poet and playwright Annie Finch. In 2003, Shange wrote and oversaw the production of Lavender Lizards and Lilac Landmines: Layla's Dream while serving as a visiting artist at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Shange's individual poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Black Scholar, Yardbird, Ms., Essence Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, VIBE, Daughters of Africa, and Third-World Women.
- NDEA fellow, 1974
- Obie Award
- Outer Critics Circle Award
- Audience Development Committee (Audelco) Award
- Mademoiselle Award
- Frank Silvera Writers' Workshop Award, 1978
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, 1981 (for Three Pieces)
- Guggenheim fellowship, 1981
- Medal of Excellence, Columbia University, 1981
- Obie Award, 1981, for Mother Courage and Her Children
- Nori Eboraci Award
- Barnard College, 1988
- Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund annual writer's award, 1992
- Paul Robeson Achievement Award, 1992
- Arts and Cultural Achievement Award
- National Coalition of 100 Black Women (Pennsylvania chapter), 1992
- Taos World Poetry Heavyweight Champion, 1992, 1993, 1994
- Living Legend Award, National Black Theatre Festival, 1993
- Claim Your Life Award
- WDAS-AM/FM, 1993
- Monarch Merit Award
- National Council for Culture and Arts
- Supersisters trading card set (one of the cards featured Shange's name and picture), 1979
- Pushcart Prize
- St. Louis Walk of Fame inductee
- Proclamation of "Ntozake Shange Day" (Borough of Manhattan, New York) by Congressman Charles Rangel on June 14, 2014.
- Shelley Memorial Award